Canva just became a completely different product

Hey — Issue #003. Let's go.

Canva AI 2.0 - this isn't a Canva update, it's a rebuild

If you've been dismissing Canva as "the tool non-designers use," it's time to pay attention again.

Canva Create dropped in April and what they launched isn't a feature update. They're calling it a "Creative Operating System" and for once the marketing speak isn't entirely wrong.

Here's what actually matters: Brand Intelligence means every design automatically uses your brand fonts, colours, and styles from the first output. No more manually applying your brand kit to every template. You describe a multi-channel campaign and it routes the work across layout, copy, imagery, and styling without you choosing each tool separately.

The part that's genuinely interesting: it now integrates directly with Claude and ChatGPT so designs generated in those tools can flow into Canva for editing. And it has persistent memory — it learns how you work across sessions.

For solo designers and small business owners, this is significant. It's not replacing Figma for product design, but for everything else — social content, presentations, marketing materials, client deliverables — it just got a lot harder to justify spending time anywhere else.

Still has the free tier. Pro is around $13/month.

Try Canva AI 2.0 →

Coolors finally added AI generation. Describe a mood - "warm sunset over brutalist architecture" - and it generates a 5-colour palette. Or paste in an image and it extracts one. If you've ever spent 30 minutes tweaking hex codes when you should've been designing, this saves your afternoon. Free. Try Coolors AI →

Realtime Colors lets you preview a colour system on a live site. You pick your palette and see it applied to an actual website layout in real time - not just swatches, but text on backgrounds, buttons, cards, the whole thing. This is the tool for anyone who's ever picked colours that looked great as circles and terrible on a page. Free. Try Realtime Colors →

Adobe Firefly is now included in all Creative Cloud plans. No extra cost. If you're already paying for CC, you have access to commercially-safe AI image generation, generative fill in Photoshop, and style transfer in Illustrator. The "commercially safe" part matters - everything Firefly generates is trained on licensed content, so no legal grey area. Worth exploring if you've been ignoring it.

Your side project needs fewer features, not more

Every side project I've seen fail (including my own) had the same problem: too many features, not enough reason to pay.

We add features because it feels like progress. Another page, another option, another "what if someone needs this." But every feature you add is a decision someone has to make, and every decision is a chance for them to leave instead of buy.

The side projects that actually make money tend to do one thing, obviously well, with one clear price. A single template pack. One specific tool. A focused checklist for a specific problem.

If you're stuck on a side project right now, try this: delete half the features. Whatever's left is probably the thing people actually want. Everything you removed was there to make you feel better, not them.

That's it for this week. Forward it if it was useful.

See you next Wednesday.

— Alex